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Remington Arms has employed thousands of workers in Ilion for generations, as other manufacturers left or closed. The emotionally charged gun debate is the latest challenge threatening the town’s largest employer.

The worn roadside sign welcomes drivers into the village of Ilion, spelling out a slogan that’s on the verge of becoming obsolete.

“Where tradition is preserved,” the brown-and-tan sign declares in all caps, “while progress is achieved.”

That progress has robbed this entire part of upstate of every traditional industry it once claimed. Except for one.

Guns.

Upstate’s manufacturing legacy still has a pulse within the Remington Arms Co. Inc. The 197-year-old firearms company stands as a brick-walled buttress against offshoring, disruptive technology and better business climates. Those forces are uprooting upstate livelihoods and transplanting them to places like South Carolina or Shenzhen, China.

Ilion senses a new threat: the emotionally charged debate over guns.

Ask the mayor, the minister or the network of family-owned subcontractors stretching across the Mohawk Valley. All will tell you that Remington is all they have left.

“If they leave, that would be the last nail in the coffin of the Mohawk Valley,” says the school superintendent, Cosimo Tangorra.

For residents, it makes for a far more complex reality than any proponent of gun control seems willing to acknowledge.

This is the overshadowed subplot in the gun-control debate, often obscured by the vitriol at gun-rights rallies. As much as culture or any other reason, the economy is the reason Ilion embraces firearms.

Their grip is tightening.

The national debate over guns reignited last December when Adam Lanza gunned down 20 first-graders, the principal and five other adults at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.

Lanza used a Bushmaster AR-15, a brand of military-style rifle. Since 2011, that gun has been made exclusively at the Remington plant in Ilion, 80 miles west of Albany. Authorities have not disclosed where Lanza’s gun was made.

Newtown sparked Remington’s owners, a private-equity firm in Manhattan, to put the company up for sale. Six states are trying to poach the Ilion plant.

On Christmas Eve, a man outside Rochester ambushed and killed two firefighters with another Bushmaster AR-15.

The back-to-back tragedies spurred Gov. Andrew Cuomo to outlaw sales of the Bushmaster AR-15, and some other products made at the Remington factory.

It places Ilion at the heart of the toughest gun ban in the nation.

It took fewer than 20 hours for the state Legislature to approve Cuomo’s assault-weapons ban, guaranteeing New York would be first to react to Newtown.

In recent years, New York has tried to keep Remington. The plant has received $5.5 million of incentives over three years, and in 2010, legislators unanimously voted to allow firearms companies to work on silencers for law enforcement—opening a new revenue stream for Remington.

“You know, they’ve made guns for almost 200 years in Ilion. And up until [December], they’ve produced legitimate products. But something has changed,” says John Scarano, a lifelong valley resident and president of the Herkimer County Chamber of Commerce.

Remington is the only thing shielding Ilion from a grueling exodus of manufacturing that is turning so many other company towns into ghost towns.

In the Mohawk Valley, the departed already include Goodyear and General Electric and factories making dresses, lipstick, typewriters, adding machines, pneumatic tools and flatware. Remington itself produced the first commercial typewriter with a QWERTY keyboard, and invented the shift key.

Also going extinct are the generational ties once so prevalent in American manufacturing. Remington preserves them—evident in Sam Meakim, who has worked alongside his twin brother for 42 years; Dale Lewis, who has worked there 46 years, the second of three generations; husband and wife Frank and Lisha Brown, who met at the factory.

These shadows now loom over Ilion, a village where you don’t have to pay to park. A buck-fifty buys a pint of LaBatt Blue during happy hour at the bowling alley. Fireworks, frog-jumping and an irreverent Doo Dah parade headline the summer festival.

Remington is by far the biggest employer. The school district is second. The nursing home is third, located in the former hospital, which closed years ago.

“That’s how we pay our mortgage. That’s how we go grocery shopping. That’s how we have vacations,” says Adam Waldo, 30, who runs a laundromat. His father has been a foreman at Remington for 30 years.

“We just don’t have anything else here,” Waldo says.

Orders for the Bushmaster AR-15 created a job at a subcontractor, lifting Linda Wagner out of a part-time, minimum-wage job cleaning hotel bathrooms.

First and second shifts at Remington recently ordered a combined 40 pizzas in one day from Sicilian immigrant Ignazio Magro. He worked a decade as a Remington janitor and groundskeeper before opening restaurants and a banquet hall.

Most of Remington’s 1,300 union members spend their annual $125 allotment for work boots at Melfe’s Shoe Service. The store is two blocks from the factory, like seemingly everything else.

“If they move, a business bomb is going to go off, from Utica to Canajoharie to Rochester,” says Wagner’s boss, Peter Stone. “There will be wreckage in the Mohawk Valley. There are no anchor companies anymore. Remington, they are the last one standing.”

Upstate, it’s an all-too-familiar fate. And so is the tension between upstate and downstate, something the gun ban inflames.

Village officials say the gun ban smacks of politicians trying to force demise on their community—exacerbating the disconnect many in Ilion feel with the power brokers downstate, a world away from their village of 8,000.

“The problem we have here is the perception that anything above Westchester County is that we’re all hicks, toothless inbred wonders who love our guns,” says Beth Neale, Ilion’s deputy mayor. “The downstate players are trying to mess with us.”

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose net worth is some $27 billion, is crusading to revive a ban on assault weapons. It would affect some of what’s made in Ilion, where some companies give cash prizes to employees who bag the largest buck and doe.

New York City’s population has never been larger, at 8.3 million. In Herkimer County, deaths began outpacing births in the late 1990s.

Downstate is a global financial capital. Many places upstate have not come back from the recession—or even recovered the jobs lost in the downturn before that.

People from downstate hold every statewide office and control both houses of the Legislature. One in three Republican senators supported Cuomo’s gun law—all from downstate.

“Our sorrow for Newtown is truly heartfelt. We are not turning our backs on tragedy,” Neale says. “But you might as well fold up the sidewalks in Ilion if Remington leaves.”

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